Splitting at the ends
by kinosternon
Summary: Three vignettes about Nezumi and Shion's hair, set during and after the series. (Rating for nudity, language, and canon-level references to violence.)
1. Cut

Nezumi, like Shion's mother Karan, seldom really bothered cutting his own hair.

Sometimes he would go after the split ends, but as he complained to Shion, he didn't really keep any scissors sharp enough to avoid doing more damage than they were worth, and cutting his hair with a knife was a pain.

Shion, though, had shorter hair, and that meant it started to look unkempt more quickly. When he asked for help with it, Nezumi was derisive, as he was about so many things.

"You're not gonna be able to hide this by cutting it off," he said. "If anything, it's gonna make it worse."

Shion already knew that whatever was going on with his hair was...not entirely natural. He'd talked that over with Nezumi the second day after waking up to find it changed: about how sure, his hair could have grown in white from the roots, but having it all turn white from the roots all the way down to the long-extruded tips was more than a little impossible.

"Consider it a blessing," Nezumi had said, tone carefully bland. "It would look pretty weird if your hair turned all at the roots, right away."

"Given that it's often a side effect of malnutrition, I'm surprised it didn't lead to hair loss," Shion had mused aloud, running a hand through his hair and frowning.

Nezumi had swatted at him and told him to be grateful for that, too. Now, though, bending over Shion after throwing an old blanket around his shoulders, it seemed to Shion that he was less than happy about where they'd ended up.

"I cannot believe you are letting me at your face with a pair of blades," Nezumi muttered. Apparently, he didn't realize that doing this placed him close enough to Shion's ears that not even the lowest mutter was out of earshot—that, or he simply didn't care.

"I've told you, I trust you," Shion says. "All this time you could have killed me in my sleep, or just gotten annoyed and attacked me, and you haven't? And that's with how easily you get annoyed, too."

"Back to antagonizing the person with a blade inches from your throat." But Nezumi didn't even sound surprised, let alone threatening; just weary, resigned to the utter lack of survival instinct of the pampered youth under his reluctant care.

"I'm not trying to antagonize you," Shion protested.

"I don't care what you're doing, as long as you hold still."

Shion had always been praised, as a small child, for holding very carefully still while hairdressers did their work. He was sure he is no different now.

Still, Nezumi left the hair around his ears conspicuously long, winced the whole time he held Shion's bangs back over his head to trim them, nowhere near his eyes. Shion couldn't tell what he was doing with the hair on his neck, but it was very careful, almost ginger. Despite this, his hands never shook, and Shion wondered exactly what it was that Nezumi was being so careful of.

"I use a knife as a weapon," Nezumi said, when he had set the scissors down for a moment and Shion deemed it safe to ask. "You don't want to know what I've done with one."

"I'm sure I don't," Shion admitted, and can't help the smile. "But that isn't a knife, it's a pair of scissors."

"It's _two knives._ "

There was no arguing with people sometimes. But when Shion fell silent, admitting defeat at least for the moment, he noticed the warmth of Nezumi's fingers in his hair, carding through as he looked for uneven areas.

His hair turned out fluffier than ever after this haircut, covered in split ends—for Nezumi was, of course, right about the dull scissors. It was yet another small thing that left Shion unable to recognize himself in the mirrors, some mornings.

But it remained a memory of touch, warmer than just about anything he's felt, aside from the nights when winter left them huddling together, or when one of them was sick, or, even, in the depths of wasp-sickness, of cold-feeling hands pressing him into a mattress thinner even than the cot he'd slept in at the bakery, lips (those were still somehow hot) whispering and shouting and cajoling in his ear.

It had been far from the first time Nezumi used a knife on him, he reflected that night, as his newly cut hair curled and tickled beside his ear. But it was by far the most bloodless of his favors, even if by some measures it was the least important of all.

It was a simple thing, not lifesaving, and so it felt like a treasure more than a favor.


	2. Condition

Nezumi let help with his hair, once, at a bathhouse in the slums.

Shion hadn't considered the possibility of a bathhouse outside the city. He hadn't considered much of anything outside of Number Six's walls, so that was no surprise, but he was shocked that something like that existed, on multiple levels.

It really wasn't that strange, as Nezumi explained to him. Humans liked hot water in large quantities, and it was difficult for any one person to get enough for themself. But if one person gathered a great deal of water in any one place, then many people could enjoy it, and could socialize at the same time.

Rikiga had recommended it recently, after hearing about how Shion had developed the habit of sluicing himself off down along with the dogs if it was a particularly dirty day, and following Nezumi's lead with cold buckets of water and spot-cleaning otherwise.

He'd leered while he offered to take them with him, and Shion suspects that the only reason he'd accepted Nezumi's refusal so easily was that the last time he'd talked to "Eve" that way, Shion had tried to strangle the man.

(That experience was the first in a long line that taught Shion to at least try to _notice_ that not all of his impulses were entirely trustworthy...even if, somehow, he couldn't always bring himself to regret following them.)

They went in the middle of the evening, when most people were eating dinner. Nezumi made a point from the start that trips to even a public bathhouse were not a luxury they could regularly afford.

Shion followed his lead as they loaded their clothing—cheap and losable, by Nezumi's insistence, and kept close to their persons regardless—into small rickety boxes that they carried with them to the washing area, where the water was provided in lukewarm buckets and didn't seem particularly clean at all. Shion shivered his way through it regardless—the cold water of the fountain was worse, after all, and the soap was at least intended for humans, rather than dogs.

Nezumi shivered against the cold, too, back all but against the wall to hide the scars he hated so much, cursing as the thin soap left his fingers tangled in his hair.

"Do you want me to help?" Shion asked, when he finished to his satisfaction and Nezumi was still not done.

Nezumi frowned at him for a long moment, and Shion saw him scan the area, and finally nod; there were screens that keep their part of the bathhouse separate from the rest, and apparently this was enough for Nezumi to feel comfortable.

Shion made himself an unobtrusively helpful extra pair of hands, focusing on the scalp. In the end, though, he dumped the water on Nezumi's head when they were done, and bit back a giggle as Nezumi spluttered dramatically, flicking water at his face in heartless retaliation.

Near the bath, there were oils, scented beautifully, at a counter beside the entrance to the women's section. Nezumi wrapped his small towel around his hips to maintain a certain basic level of modesty, and flirted outrageously with the girl at the booth until he got a set of his own. Then he took it to the men's section and settled into the hot water, sighing happily at the recently-changed, near-boiling bath, before starting in on his hair, working the oil into it tips to roots.

It smelled of roses. Also, Shion noticed quickly that Nezumi was only working on one side, and it looked like it could take take a very long time.

So he set up shop on Nezumi's other side, and, ignoring the slow but somehow still-piercing sideways silver glance, started working on his other side.

There were no knives. There was nothing for Nezumi to fear—not even his fingernails, because Shion, careful as always not to bite them, has nevertheless had to keep them shorter, as poorer nutrition has started to lead to them weakening. Hours of washing dogs, too, had left them soft and prone to tear, tangling in overenthusiastic fur.

No knives, then, and no sharp edges. Nezumi grew...not calmer, but perhaps more and more still, the longer they worked, even as his fingers never slowed or stilled. There was only the smell of rose-scented oil, the haze of steam that seemed to vanish only between the two of them, the dripping sounds of water, and the slither of hair, almost audible but not quite, under his fingers.

When another pair of visitors—father and son, it looked like, though Shion knew well enough not to meet other men's eyes in a bathhouse—finally broke the stillness, Nezumi pulled away almost fast enough for freshly-oiled hair to tangle, and finished by himself, fingers moving easily at twice the speed they had before.

Shion, for his part, tilted his head back to look at the ceiling, and half-closed his eyes, enjoying the heat and still feeling the imprint of countless silky, dark strands under his hands.

Nezumi washed his hair again before they'd left, grimacing, and then used Shion's body as a shield as he pinned his hair up before pulling his own clothes back on. They didn't talk much on the way back, Shion getting the occasional sense he'd started to develop of Nezumi's more fragile moods.

The rose scent lingered in odd corners of their apartment for days after.


	3. Grow

Shion tries to grow his hair out, after Nezumi leaves.

It should be an easy enough thing; it's only hair. But it grows thick, before it grows out, and gets less and less tameable. As spring moves into summer, it gets hot, itchy, and noticeably thick.

People don't comment on the tangle as much as he expects. Likely that has to do with the color, the scar on his face—people are already biting their tongues.

But he notices. Around the mirror, as the tongues of hair start to split like opening dandelions, and grow thicker and thicker. He can't draw a comb through his own hair anymore, and somehow it still manages to grow in and around and out more than it ever does down.

He thinks about it every few weeks. Autumn makes it more bearable, but it's such a weight at that point that he thinks about it several times a week. By the time winter starts to come, the baby—he cannot help calling her Safu, in his head, though he figures she might have a name she'd like for herself better, and his mother has her own ideas of naming her after Safu's grandmother—starts tangling her tiny fingers in his hair solidly enough that a few times he could swear he would have to cut her loose.

He starts trying to tie it down, back, out of his eyes, anything. But his hair follicles are too sturdy for his scalp, and it aches, when he puts it in in the morning and when he takes it out at the end of the day.

Somewhere along the line, he realizes as he stares at a shampoo ration that is already half gone when it's going to have to last him twice as long as it's been...somewhere along the line, he started thinking of it as _I won't cut my hair till I see him again._

And that is ill-advised, for a variety of reasons. The first being that it feels...oddly controlling. Not of himself—if he wants to make an odd decision, he can make it—but of Nezumi.

Because, sure, Nezumi said he'd be back. That was a promise that he made. But he made no promise as to when. And anything he, Shion, does in hopes that that time will be shorter—anything that will set a limit on it, make it any shorter than Nezumi needs (and damned well deserves, besides)—feels like a chain around his neck. It's a sin that would weigh on both of them.

Right now, it's just a thought that weighs on his conscience, and on Nezumi's memory. And he's okay with that.

Some days, he really needs the extra weight.

* * *

 **A/N:** **Will Shion ever get that haircut? Who knows. (Probably eventually—I would guess his hair doesn't grow out too well.)**

 **I have some other stuff I've worked on for these two, but it needs more of a polish before I can put it up. Gaps to fill in, checking to do, stuff like that. But at least I've gotten this out there. ;P**

 **Thanks for reading!**


End file.
